THE SCENE: Cool spring morning, don’t get much better. Waxing crescent
F3 WELCOME & DISCLAIMER
WARM-O-RAMA:
- SSH
- Hairy Rockettes
- Imperial Squawkers
- Tempo Lunges
- LBACs
- Grady Corn
- Moroccan night clubs
- Cherry pickers
THA-THANG:
- Mosey to the recruiting center, grab a block
- CMU pyramid (5, 10, 15, 20, 15 10, 5)
- Curls
- Lunges (each leg)
- OHP
- Squats
- Extensions
- Rows (each arm)
- 1/2/3/4/3/2/1 pull ups
- 1 Irkie Dirkie
- Stopped at 0600
- Grab a battle buddy and a log
- Lurches – together, lunge step forward, at the top golden arch to the other shoulder
- To the top of the parking lot
- 5 power merkins each
- To the bottom of the parking lot
MARY:
We definitely did a little
COUNT-OFF & NAME-O-RAMA
CIRCLE OF TRUST/BOM:
I would like to propose a few types of rules that people live by
Rule of War – Do it to them before they do it to us
Eye for an eye – Don’t do worse to them than they did to you
Silver rule – Don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you
Golden rule – Do unto others what you would have them do to you
God’s rule – Love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 9:18)
Jesus new commandment – Love one another as I have loved you (John 13:34)
Now, if I were a preacher, this could be a whole sermon series, but since I am not, I just want to hang out around last step. When one reads “Love your neighbor as yourself”, it lands as the highest demand that you could make on someone. In fact, I think most people don’t really distinguish the top three tiers of this list. But I think there is actually a lot going on up here at the top.
My eyes have been most opened to this as, over the past ten years, I have attempted to be a father to my son. Being a father has demanded from me an enormous amount of growth, which I frankly didn’t think I needed before I started. When I was married without children, I pretty much had the whole “love your neighbor” thing down. I was a pretty charismatic guy who knew how to steer a situation toward good outcomes, and pretty much did right by all, at least on a comparative scale. And having a baby made it tougher, cause it was exhausting, but I had served on a submarine, so sleep deprivation was kinda normal already. But then the boy turned two and things went downhill. For some reason, he didn’t obey my every word, in spite of my very good imitation of the way good parents act on TV. As the years went on, I descended into a mindset of figuring out how to force my son to behave, and as my methods escalated, I started realizing that I didn’t like the path I was on. But I was caught in a mental trap, on one side an intense responsibility to “raise him right” and an intense reality of how things were actually going.
Eventually, I arrived at the realization that the difference was the rule. For most people, I lived in the golden rule zone, treating them the way I wanted to be treated. But with my son, I was operating on the next level up, I was loving him as myself. Trouble is, I didn’t love myself very well. While on the exterior I was all relaxed and friendly to others, internally I was a slave driver. My son had the unfortunate experience of actually being loved by me more. Pride played a huge role in this, leading me to have low expectations of others while demanding more and more of myself, primarily in the form of external performance. But with Paul, I expected everything, even more than myself because he had the full attention of potentially the greatest dad ever born.
And that’s the genius of Jesus’ new commandment. Rather than allowing my own, twisted internals to set the standard, the expectations are nailed to a cross. I need to stop trying to make a better version of me and start acting like Him.
MOLESKIN:
Ran out of time for my planned work at the wall. Maybe next time.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Hardship Hill, Forg3, Dragon boat race